A true conservative woman, who can find?
Nikki Haley's doomed 2024 presidential candidacy & the shortage of good female candidates
Image: Pixabay Photo
In 2011, Nimarata Nikki Haley was sworn into office as the first female governor of South Carolina, subsequently becoming the youngest governor in the history of the United States (she was 38).
Haley grew up in Bamberg, South Carolina, born as the daughter to two Indian immigrants. Per U.S. News, before Haley’s stint as governor, she was an accountant who served three terms in the state’s House of Representatives. During the Trump administration, Haley also served as a U.N. ambassador.
In February, Haley announced a 2024 presidential candidacy, becoming the second person since November 2022 to launch a presidential campaign. The first, of course, was President Donald Trump. Following Haley’s announcement, businessman Vivek Ramaswamy threw his hat into the GOP ring as well.
Notably, Haley is now one of more than 50 women to run for the office of presidency. To date, no woman has ever been the nominee for the Republican Party. Hillary Clinton, of course, was the first woman to win the Democrat Party’s Presidential Nomination in 2016. She is also the only woman to win a “major” party’s nomination.
Via NBC, Haley is the first female governor to run for president, and only the fifth Republican woman to run for the highest office in the land.
The first woman to run for president was a eugenicist (yes, really)
The first woman to run for president was Victoria Woodhull in 1872. She was not exactly a shining beacon of integrity and morality. Woodhull was an odd duck. She traveled with her family as a young adult, telling fortunes and working alongside her sister, Tennessee. Via Women’s History, Woodhull marketed herself as a “medical clairvoyant” and became an advocate of the “free love” movement, which pushed for partnership over marriage – easy come, easy go. Woodhull and her second husband both worked as mediums. Later, they published a newspaper that was known for pushing “progressive” work, with a special focus on Karl Marx’s Communist Manifesto.
Later in life, after her presidential bid (which was not at all successful, and let’s be real: it wasn’t just because of her gender), she published a journal with her daughter called Humanitarian. Via Women’s History, selective human breeding was the focus of the journal between 1892 and 1901:
“The journal was known for promoting eugenics, the selective breeding and sterilization of a population intended to lead to desirable genetic characteristics. It was a popular school of thought in the late-nineteenth century, but one that discriminated against those thought to be inferior, whether because of race, ability, or another quality.”
I find it wholly embarrassing that this woman was the first female in the U.S. to run for president. And sadly, there haven’t been a lot of viable candidates since. There have been some noble tries, for sure. Laura Clay, for example, ran for the Democrat Party in 1920. She advocated for a woman’s right to vote – both black and white.
Of course, there was also Charlene Mitchell (1968). She ran on the American Communist Party ticket. Her candidacy didn’t go farther than 1,100 votes nationwide.
NBC highlighted these presidential candidacy statistics in their report (looking at “major” parties only):
· 12 women have run as Democrats,
· 4 women (other than Haley) have run as Republicans,
· 2 women have run for the Green Party,
· 2 women have run for the Equal Rights Party,
· And 1 woman each has run for the New Alliance, Citizen, and Libertarian Party.
Women in politics
I’ll posit here that ever since I was a young girl, I had a picture in my head of what a strong, fearless, and dignified female leader in the U.S. would look like. As a kid, I really thought that by the time I had graduated from high school, we’d have had a female president, but that was not to be.
My optimism on the subject led me to write a 1,000-page science fiction novel in early high school (by hand!) about a young woman who served as a senator and later became president. Interestingly, in my first bestselling book series that was released years later (the Collapse Series), the main character, Cassidy Hart, also takes a similar character journey. She begins as a foot soldier in a rebel militia, ascends to the rank of commander, jumps into being a senator, and then eventually ascends to the office of presidency in a post-apocalyptic United States territory.
Clearly, I’ve given the whole female president thing a lot of thought.
Growing up, I often wondered about the odd vacuum in politics when it came to women who were serving their country in legislative positions. It seemed as if women were prominent largely in progressive circles. Democrat women like Hillary Clinton, for example, seemed to get tremendous airtime. I didn’t see any candidate who strongly represented conservatism, and this irked me. Where were all the real conservative women at?
When Sarah Palin ran for vice president in 2008, I remember wearing a “McCain/Palin” button on my shirt in the months leading up to the election, excited that there was a woman in the race. Now, in a post-Trump era, I realize that the McCain/Palin ticket was nothing more than stale, uninspired GOP political theater – but I didn’t know that back then. I was still waiting for someone to rise from the monochromatic crowd of GOP sameness and breathe fresh life into the Republican Party.
While Nikki Haley was a functionally effective governor of South Carolina in the early 2000s, her roots were as troubling then as they are now. Haley comes from an era of GOP leadership that was forged during the dynastic political empires of the Clintons and Bushes.
In fact, Fox News’ Tucker Carlson recently made an astute observation on Haley during a segment on his show:
“She may be running to be the Republican nominee, but she is fundamentally indistinguishable from the neoliberal donor base of the Democratic Party. Nikki Haley believes in collective racial guilt. She thinks Ukraine’s borders are more important than our own, far more important. She believes identity politics is our future. Vote for me, because I’m a woman, that’s her pitch.”
Let’s take a closer look at these claims, because if they are true, they are deeply troubling – and sadly predictable.
Collective racial guilt
In Haley’s presidential announcement commercial, she claimed that it was “time for a new generation of leadership.” The only problem with her statement is that there is really nothing “new” or refreshing about her approach to politics in America.
Her stance on the Confederate flag, for example, has been flip-floppy, bouncing between heralding the flag as something that is “about the heritage and how this is not something that is racist” to calling for the Confederate flag to be removed from the state Capitol in Charleston in 2015 following a mass church shooting where the perpetrator hijacked the flag. Mediaite reported that Haley then remarked, “There is a place for that flag. It’s not in a place that represents all people in South Carolina.”
The biggest issue here is that Haley doesn’t seem to stand firm in what she says – she tends to change her stance depending on the circumstance, rather than adhering to one objective worldview or standard from which she administers her leadership.
Even more troubling, Haley pitched a line to the poison of identity politics in February during her first campaign speech: “As a brown girl growing up in a black and white world, I saw the promise of America unfold before me.”
Identity politics is not the way to win the hearts of the GOP voter base. In a world where most Americans are tired and fed-up with the tribality and division that is driving a stake through the heart of the nation, highlighting skin color or perceived ethnic disparities will only serve to widen the gap between “us” and “them.”
Haley is in way over her head with that one.
In 2020, Haley made the same claim at the Republican National Convention, stating, “I was a brown girl, in a black and white world. We faced discrimination and hardship.” In the same speech, she noted that, “it’s now fashionable to say that America is racist. That is a lie. America is not a racist country.”
While I agree with her that America is NOT a racist country, I take issue with Haley playing the race card when she thinks it will score her political points with potential constituents.
In 2012, Haley published a memoir titled, “Can’t is Not an Option.” She focused on race yet again her comments to the New York Times ahead of the book’s release:
“Another story that I talk about in the book is when I was playing kickball, the other kids wouldn’t play with me unless I picked a team, which basically meant picking a race: Am I black or am I white? Issues like that kept coming up throughout my childhood and into adulthood. A white legislature would call me a ‘raghead,’ and a black legislature would call me a ‘conservative with a tan.’”
Voting for someone because of their gender
As a woman myself, I naturally like to see strong, dignified women taking leadership roles across the country, on both a state and federal level. That being said, someone’s gender alone is NOT a good reason to vote for them.
Haley has positioned herself in this 2024 bid to use her sex as a tool to leverage moderate and left-leaning voters in her direction, but it will not work. We’ve seen this dog-and-pony trick before, and it’s a little stale. In her initial campaign video, Haley quipped, “I don’t put up with bullies. And when you kick back, it hurts them more if you’re wearing heels.”
While the sentiment is clever, we can look at someone like Kari Lake in Arizona and see what real, tough, unflinching, and feminine leadership looks like. Lake is politically “incorrect,” but she is a fearless warrior. She doesn’t care about race. She doesn’t even care about gender. She cares about justice – and best of all, Lake is a TRUE Washington outsider.
Haley is not.
In the same 2012 interview I referenced earlier, Haley told the New York Times that the reason she ran for office was because of Hillary Clinton. She said,“…I went to Birmingham University, and Hillary Clinton was the keynote speaker on a leadership institute, and she said that when it comes to women running for office, there will be everybody that tells you why you shouldn’t but that’s all the reasons why we need you to do it, and I walked out of there thinking ‘That’s it. I’m running for office.’”
It's nice to know that one of the most corrupt political American aristocrats in the nation inspires Haley so deeply, isn’t it?
Ukrainian support and a broken vow
Haley’s campaign videos are so polished. She gleams like a shiny coin, and her smile is relaxed and genuine (we hope!). Unfortunately, while she seems to say all the right things, her track record is rife with contradiction. In a recent press statement from the Trump campaign, they laid out the following facts:
“Haley gave an interview on FOX News and said the United States should get ‘Ukraine what they’ve asked for, which is those planes.’
She also admitted the Ukraine invasion ‘never would have happened’ under President Trump: ‘As much as everybody wants to talk about what he says, what I look at is what he did. He sanctioned Russia. He expelled diplomats. He shut off Nord Stream 2. He built up our military, and he made us energy independent. All of those things countered Putin and countered Russia. This never would have happened under Trump.’”
Haley’s statement about Trump contradicts her public criticism of the president in 2021, where she foolishly lambasted him in the wake of Jan. 6, without stopping to consider the ramifications of her comments.
She slammed Trump (who, ironically, was the one who got her the UN ambassadorship in the White House), accusing him of “turning the American people against each other,” via The Hill.
Haley also broke a promise that she made to the American public, in which she vowed NOT to run for president in 2024 IF President Trump was running at the same time. Her duplicity is extremely alarming. How can she be trusted when she is constantly flip-flopping her positions on things like Ukraine, race and running for president?
Nikki Haley’s mega-donors represent the same old Washington SWAMP
The word “swamp” means so many things. It is representative of D.C. corruption, mafia-like money laundering, insider trading, under-the-table bribery, and so much more (and worse). Our country is weakened by the hedonistic and global machinations of most of the “leaders” in Washington today, and I’m afraid that Nikki Haley’s biggest GOP donors are simply more of the same.
According to a report from Politico, Haley’s nonprofit organization (Stand for America, Inc.) has raked in big bucks from the following:
“…New York hedge fund manager Paul Singer, investor Stanley Druckenmiller, and Miriam Adelson and her late husband, casino mogul Sheldon Adelson, the Internal Revenue Service filings reveal. The roster of supporters who gave undisclosed donations in 2019 also includes Suzanne Youngkin, the wife of Virginia Gov. Glenn Youngkin, himself a possible presidential contender; former Pennsylvania Senate candidate and hedge fund executive David McCormick; and Vivek and Lakshmi Garipalli, members of a New Jersey family that has donated large sums to Democrats — but which gave Haley’s organization $1 million.
The donor list also includes dozens of people who gave anonymously to Haley’s nonprofit but have not given disclosed contributions to her PAC, which was formed two years later and is required to regularly disclose the names of donors who give at least $200. Those contributors include the Garipallis and GOP megadonor Joe Ricketts.”
The report further posited: “And the names of her donors demonstrate the deep connections Haley has formed at the top levels of the Republican Party, with some of the GOP’s biggest super PAC donors among those who gave money to fund the launch of her organization after she left the Trump administration.”
Haley is NOT a “new generation” of leadership. She has opted to kick back and relax with the nation’s wealthiest GOP donors. The Uniparty is alive and well, and Haley has embraced them warmly.
She won’t win
Haley doesn’t have a chance of winning a presidential election in 2024, so it’s unclear why she would run – unless the aim is to suck up around 5-6 percent of Republican primary votes away from the nominee, which will be President Trump (inarguably, even if Gov. Ron DeSantis, R-Fla., decides to run).
In a new I&I/TIPP poll, Trump accrued a staggering 50 percent of Republican primary voters’ support. Even DeSantis, who is supposedly the golden-child and heir apparent of the conservative voter base, only managed to net 27 percent of support.
In the same poll, Haley only scored 1 percent of support.
Haley has consistently polled at between 3-7 percent in every presidential primary poll. She does not have the support of the MAGA voting base, and she never will. This alone dooms her candidacy.
Haley will never appeal to the blue-collared men and women of this country who have been crushed under the inflationary pressures of a tyrannical Biden administration. She will never be as strong or as decisive about immigration as Trump. She will never gain the hearts of conservative voters by embracing spiteful identity politics and using either gender or race to sway Americans one direction or the other.
Nikki Haley should be recognized for some of her accomplishments as governor in South Carolina and as a U.N. ambassador, but she is not an America First candidate.
Remember that in 2024. Her words may seem refreshing now, but her past actions speak loudly for themselves.